


Unforgivable

by ExpositionFairy



Category: Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types, Tron: Legacy (2010)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-06
Updated: 2012-11-06
Packaged: 2017-11-18 03:34:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/556437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExpositionFairy/pseuds/ExpositionFairy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alan is finally asleep, thank God.  Lora is not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unforgivable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wtb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wtb/gifts).



> Set immediately after the events of [No Comment](http://archiveofourown.org/works/556431)

In a string of bad days—three months of them now, a quarter of a year—today might just have been one of the worst, and she hadn’t even  _been_  there for it really; she’d been at USC most of the day, giving a guest lecture on applied particle physics to a small audience of graduate students.  Not that her heart had been in it, not all the way, but if she doesn’t work she’ll go mad, swallowed by the worry and the grief and the confusion and the other, less definable emotions swirling uneasily just below the surface.  She’d been there for the fallout, though, and that had been bad enough.  
  
Alan had come home late after dropping Sam back off at home with his grandparents, and she’d known instantly that their day out together had been a bad scene.  His body language told her everything she needed to know: the door slamming behind him when he’d walked into the house, the silence and stiffness when she’d hugged him.  He’d  _growled_  when the phone rang, and if Lora hadn’t picked it up herself (Roy, wanting to know if dinner was still on; she’d apologize to him properly tomorrow), she believed Alan would have ripped the thing out of the wall and hurled it across the room.  
  
She’d eventually sat him down in the living room with a cup of strong tea and the lights turned low to ward off the headache that he was almost certainly working on, and coaxed the story out of him.   _It’s a good thing I_ wasn’t _there_ , she’d replied as he’d related the incident with the reporter from KCBS 2,  _I’d have bent him over your hood and shoved that microphone right up his greasy, harrying ass._  
  
That had gotten a bark of laughter out of him, and he’d relaxed at last, sinking heavily against her.  They’d stayed there a while, in the dim, quiet living room on their well-used and entirely too comfortable couch.  Not talking, simply letting warmth and contact smooth away the jagged edges of  the day.  
  
Now, though, past midnight in the total darkness of their bedroom, Lora finds her thoughts going down the roads she works so hard to avoid during the day. Turning to Kevin.  
  
She’d known him longer than Alan, of course, longer than any of the others in their tight little family of choice.  Had loved him, once, and with passion. They’d been two brilliant young adults high on passion for their work and for each other—he’d never dismissed Lora, the way so many others in her department at Caltech did, as just a pretty decoration in the lab.  They’d graduated together, applied and been hired at Encom (then a fledgling tech startup just beginning to take off) together, lived and dreamed together for nearly five years.  They’d even talked once or twice about getting married, though part of Lora had always known it wasn’t in the cards.  Still, she’d loved him, there’d been no doubt.  Part of her loved him still, and always would.  
  
The trouble was, she’d known the rest of him too, just as intimately.  Kevin was brilliant and passionate and funny and had a magnetism about him that made it hard not to love him…but his attention span was wildly unpredictable, and the connections he made—with her, with his friends, with his own interests—never quite seemed to catch hold long enough to feel truly lasting. Then there were the mood swings, the odd bursts of wild, giddy mania over some new passion that would inevitably dissolve into childish tantrums or frozen, disconnected depression whenever a roadblock barred his way.  Once or twice Lora’d even wondered about bipolar disorder, but never to Kevin’s face, and anyway armchair psychiatry was a fool’s game, certainly not Lora’s field.  Now, in the wake of Kevin’s disappearance, with the words of the reporter that had accosted Alan and Sam in a city center parking lot fresh in her mind, she finds herself wondering again, and it makes her uneasy in her heart.  
  
She doesn’t want to believe Kevin would have,  _could_  have deliberately run away (or worse…but she won’t let herself think about that, not yet).  She’d seen the way he was those last few weeks, though, driven and manic and hinting at nebulous Big Things that he refused to fully share no matter how much she and Alan and Roy had pressed.  Seen past his charisma to how brittle he was around  the edges, how close to cracking up altogether.  (The book—God,  _the book_ , she doesn’t understand how Roy can read it and be so enthusiastic about the ideas Kevin had rambled about when all it had invoked in her was outright alarm.)   No, she doesn’t  _want_  to believe he’d run away and abandoned them all…but he  _could_  have.  
  
He could have.  
  
She supposes it’s sick of her, but more and more Lora hopes that the police will turn up some evidence of foul play.  Please God only kidnapping and not murder, please God there’s some hope that they’ll get him back alive.  Just as long as it’s  _someone else’s fault_.  The pain in her own heart she can stand, she can deal with that, but the way it’s affecting Alan…the way it’s affecting _Sam…_  
  
It had  _better_  be someone else’s fault.  Because if it’s his, if vanishing from their lives was a  _conscious decision_  on Kevin’s part, crazy or not, Lora doesn’t know that she’ll ever be able to forgive him.


End file.
